Back in July I wrote a blogpost about the new Philip Pullman book La Belle Sauvage, my main gripe being that Independent Bookshops such as my own were being completely priced out of selling any copies, due to the aggressive pre-publication discounting of larger retailers with deep pockets.

One of the perks of running a bookshop is that you often receive ‘proof’ copies of books, those being, for the uninitiated, uncorrected draft versions of forthcoming publications. If you’ve ever read a book and thought:

What this really needs is a few spelling mistakes, some confusing typos, a front cover entirely comprised of writing and absolutely no re-sell value